


Steigerung

by redsunsaint, reyleaux (witchoil)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bonding Through Shared Traumas, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Eventual Smut, F/M, Force As Living Thing, Force Bond Lite, Goethe's Theory of Colors, Mild Gore, Mutual Maturation, Pre-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Rating will change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-10
Updated: 2017-12-08
Packaged: 2019-01-16 17:30:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12347289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redsunsaint/pseuds/redsunsaint, https://archiveofourown.org/users/witchoil/pseuds/reyleaux
Summary: "The blue sky (or ocean) is seen as produced by the passing of the darkness of space (or the ocean bottom) through the light-filled medium of the air (or water). So it is that the air acts as the bearer of darkness in producing the warm colors and as the bearer of light for the cool colors. ...light through darkness -> warm colors;darkness through light -> cool colors.... Now the white sheets are pushed together to create a color...that isnot to be found in Newton's spectrum.Goethe...spoke of it as arising due to an 'intensification' (Steigerung) of the violet and the red as distinct from the mixing of yellow and blue to give green."Zajonc, Arthur G., "Goethe's theory of color and scientific intuition.",American Journal of Physics, 1976





	1. The First Completion: Afterimage (I)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey meets a myth and a ghost who attends him; with him and elsewhere.
> 
> "He considered the tendency of the eye to create afterimages of extreme significance and indeed generalized it as 'The Law of Required Change.' This law states that as a strong impression is received, its complement is produced by the individual ... thus the appearance of an afterimage, tears when joyful, and so on." - Zajonc, pp.327-328

****Ø** **

**\--**

**[\- 00, 00:02.29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlT-sJLfCPU&start=59)  [ Starkiller Base ]**

_Tell me about the droid._

_He’s a BB unit with a selenium drive and a thermal hyperscan vindicator–_

_It’s carrying a section of a navigational chart. And we have the rest, recovered from the archives of the Empire, but we need the last piece. And somehow you convinced the droid to show it to you._

_You,_

_a scavenger._

_You know I can take whatever I want._

_…_

_(You,_

_you’re afraid._

_That you will never be as strong_

_as Darth Vader.)_

**00, 00:00.00**

**\--**

**I**

**\--**

**\+ 00, 04:37.40  [ D’Qar ]**

\--

The Force reverberated with voices, bits of light that eddied around an emptiness where _something_ ought to have been. There was a jagged-edged hole in Rey’s mind, pulsing like a fresh wound. She pressed it. Recoiled. Pressed it again. She stayed still for what felt like hours, holding herself tightly in. Her shoulders shook with the effort. Something was trying to pull her apart.

Something else tugged at her arm.

Rey spun, mouth splitting, ready to snarl. It was Chewbacca; she registered this distantly. His face blurred but the feel of his fur remained distinct. He pulled back, said something, his hands rising up in placation, but the warble of his voice was lost to the rush of blood through Rey’s head, of machinery grinding around her.

The ground began to split apart again, the cracks filling up with sky instead of fire. But whose sky was this? Soft white instead of blinding blue… Rey rose, stumbling toward it, feeling herself fumbling down the ramp.

As her unsteady feet found the tarmac, Rey realized she did not know where she was.

A chorus of unfamiliar voices swept over her on unfamiliar, humid air and she seemed to slow down as everything else sped up. Chewbacca was brushing past her, wailing orders at the medics that swarmed up to meet them. Behind, Finn emerged on a stretcher, still except for the loll of his head. Why was he so still?

She reached out for a memory and found it, like her, shredded into pieces. She recalled the leaden weight of Finn in her arms and the tightness in the hinges of her jaw as screams tore their way out of cold, raw lungs. She recalled snow refusing to melt on his brow and the split that ran up the back of his jacket. She recalled the helplessness of waiting for help to arrive.

But as soon as they had begun, the flashes stopped, carried away with Finn across the landing strip. Rey’s gaze followed him until drawn away by a point of stillness amongst the crowd. She looked up to Leia whose eyes were already waiting for her, composed and erect amongst the chaos.

_D’Qar, it’s called D’Qar. I’ve been here before_. More green, more blue. More white above her.

Leia extended an arm out to her and Rey pitched toward it, reeling. The general folded Rey in neatly against her chest, wrapped herself around her. Rey allowed herself to press her face into Leia’s hair, the feeling of it nearly lost on her windbitten cheeks.

In the quiet between her heaving breaths, Rey realized that the General was breathing soft hushing noises into her shoulder and holding her tightly. Rey realized she was crying.

“It’s okay, Rey. I know, it’s okay. I felt it too.”

A needle-like pain pierced far into the back of Rey’s head, into a soft space between throat and skull, as she recognized the words. It tasted like blood behind her teeth. It drowned out everything else.

In her mind, his eyes fix her in place. _You know I can take whatever I want._ He takes Han. She hadn’t even _imagined_ \-- And she cannot help it, but she screams like wind -- unhearing and unheard. The sun goes black. And he finds her again in the woods, takes more, until she drives him back, teeth gnashing, and cuts him down. She rises like lightning and cracks above him, now just a trembling shadow cast on snow. The fear is gone; she cannot feel it, she cannot even _find_ it--

Rey closed her eyes to the memory, the pressure inside her head still straining insistently against her eyelids, and sank back into the grey and garbled static that had cradled her in the aftermath.

\--

Despite D’Qar’s balmy weather and the light that streamed between the durasteel window slats, Rey awoke sluggish and impaired. Bags hung heavy under her eyes and her head ached as it had for a week, now. But worse, that place in the bowl of her skull had throbbed, raw and tender, all night and pulled her unwillingly through what felt like years of meaningless, fractured dreams.

Now that she was free of them, Rey was immersed in the noise of the base. The feeling was not entirely unfamiliar but had grown tenfold since Starkiller, her awareness of others now heightened to the point of discomfort until she could find a way to dampen it.

Rey turned over on her small cot, hair falling from her buns, face blank except for the obvious traces of her fatigue, and rolled her eyes. Regardless of how she felt there was still work to do. There was always work to do.

\--

After four days of suffering through her meals in the mess with the ear-ringing pressure of a roomful of pity leveled at the back of her head, Rey had changed tactics. She waited until the chatter thinned before she stole in, quickly loaded her aluminum plate, and made for the nearest exit.

She had had enough of thin reassurances. Sick of voices overcompensating for their lack of certainty with a rushed rise and fall that chimed near-musically in her overcrowded head. _Finn will be up and running around the base before you know it,_ they insisted. _Nothing could keep that boy away from the fight._ A forced chuckle.

But Rey remembered Finn on Jakku, on Takodana. His wild eyes and racing heart as he scrambled across the galaxy, desperate to get stars behind him until the core was dim in the distance. Until he could have something new.

Now she was sitting across from his motionless form, trying to memorize the lines on his face and the soothing texture of the shape he left in the Force. She mumbled to him over spoonfuls of sticky, cooling oatmeal.

“I’m leaving today.”

Finn did not respond, but breathed quietly, steadily. It was enough.

"I've talked with the General and she wants me to go to him." Rey scraped her bowl. "Luke Skywalker, I mean."

"I think she wants me to bring him back here."

In this, Leia had been adamant.

"I know it's a lot to ask, Rey,” Leia had said, “but we need you to do this. Bring the lightsaber. Tell him it's time." Her voice had been heavy and her thoughts already somewhere else, somewhere private.

Rey wondered why. But in the space of a breath, her question was put to rest.

A current of understanding came to her like an old friend – _Listen_ , it seemed to tell her, _it must be you because she is afraid. Do what she can't because it must be done._ Like a light going off, it made Leia's hesitance clear. Though her hands were still, her Force presence shifted inwards and outwards from her as she spoke. Though her voice had been steady, a close-noted harmony sounded under it.

And then that current had pulled again and Rey realized something more.

She confessed this to Finn, "I don't know if I can bring him back."

Finn's eyelids fluttered in his sleep. Rey considered her empty bowl and the numbers on her chrono. She and Chewie were set to leave in less than an hour and she still had one last briefing with the General before takeoff. Time to go.

She said her goodbye in a whisper, “We’ll see each other again, I believe that,” and rose to dust a kiss on Finn’s forehead, as she had seen mothers do with their children and those children with their siblings. “Thank you, my friend.”

She could still feel him as she and Chewie took off -- a splotch of scale-like shimmering teal in her mind’s-eye -- triangulating her between this place-to-return-to and another point far-off, blinking, a distant and inflamed red.

\--

**\+ 09, 13:12.00 [ Ahch-To ]**

\--

Under Chewie’s instruction, Rey tried to pass the time with sleep. For all its mystery, the way to Luke was hardly treacherous and Chewie reasoned that he would have plenty of time to rest once they had landed. She thought about arguing that she’d only just woken up a few hours prior, but a stern wail from Chewie and admonishment from Artoo (“ _Let the wookiee win_.”) had her dropping her rucksack in the co-pilot’s chair and making her way to the back cabin.

And it wasn’t long after that the welcome silence of space -- compared to the constant activity of the base -- had her nodding right off.

Her dreams out here were quieter but no less vivid. She dreamed of her home on Jakku, blessedly familiar and sparse. Here, her small flower still leaned in its cup; her threadbare hammock swung as the AT-AT shifted in the sand; her wall held five thousand, three hundred and seventeen tallies, the last count she’d made before she left. A light peered into the cool, dusty air of her home, cut by the curtain hung in front of the entrance hatch, to land on the spot where she’d left her last tally. When Rey leaned down to examine the fresh scratch, the beam crossed her spine and came to land like gentle fingers splayed across the back of her neck. She sat and made her count again.

Rey slept so hard and so deeply that at first upon waking she was unsure which world was the dream. But Chewie’s calls were hard to ignore and Artoo’s pinch to her leg was _definitely_ not a figment of her imagination.

She climbed up to the main cabin on heavy feet just in time to see the sea of Ahch-To rise before the window.

“ _Almost there,_ ” Chewie said over a furry shoulder. “ _We’ll probably be putting down in five minutes if the coordinates are right._ ”

Rey nodded blearily and stood by the co-pilot’s chair until Chewie began a gentle descent towards a bare, relatively flat plateau. The sea rose up to meet them as they landed and for the second time in recent memory Rey was struck by her own deprivation on Jakku. That there could be this much water anywhere…

The engines of the _Falcon_ hummed quietly as they powered down, suddenly stopping with a lurch.

Rey looked out the cockpit window as Chewie retreated to another section of the _Falcon_. She regarded the sea as one regards an unfamiliar animal, with both awe and suspicion -- the calculating eye of the hunter placed in the nervous head of prey. The sea shifted but did not attack. Rey remained skeptical, comforted only by the steady, mechanical reassurance of the engines.

Except that those engines had just finished powering down.

Rey stayed still except for a hand reaching to her belt, trying to sense anything near her.

Then, a soft rasp, like the drag of leather against itself, and a sense of a presence only as large as a droid. There was a tiny crackle of anticipation in the air, the kind that comes just before someone speaks.

Rey turned and saw no one there.

\--

It was, shockingly, Luke who broke the silence the first time they met, his face screwing up in an obvious effort to keep his frankly ridiculous expression intact. After a few moments of struggle, he let out a small, wheezing laugh, whiskers shivering in the wind.

“Welcome.” His eyes crinkled and he smiled.

Rey simply stared back, all the concern on her face morphing into a combination of confusion and disbelief. What she’d expected of him she wasn’t entirely sure, but it wasn’t this. He felt...steady. He felt warm. The smile curling his round cheeks extended outward into the Force all around him and he stepped down towards her.

“You’re a bit late for class, you know,” he said.

A salty wind whipped at Rey’s hair and stung her eyes. “What?”

“What’s your name?”

“Um, Rey. And you’re--”

“Pleased to meet you, Rey,” he said, crossing unsteadily over rock and gravel to meet her on the scrub. “And whatever you’re about to say, it’s just Luke. Maybe Skywalker if you’re feeling martial.”

Rey nodded dumbly in response.

“You can put that away, by the way,” he said, gesturing with a robed arm towards the lightsaber she was still holding up, casually rejecting the offering which had been the entire premise of her journey. “I don’t-- It’s not mine anymore.”

Letting out a soft, “oh,” Rey cast her eyes down at the lightsaber and tucked it back into her belt. She did not see Luke’s smile at the action but she felt the soft hum of rightness that it lit in him.  “Are you sure?”

Again, the flicker of humor turning swiftly over his face, again a Force harmony that said something like familiarity. “Stop trying to give it away, Rey, it’s yours now. Those--” Luke said, gesturing to the weapons at Rey’s hip, “are not my tools anymore.”

With that, Luke turned away slowly down an invisible path and gestured with a worn prosthetic hand that she follow.

\--

Luke's camp rested in a rock hollow further "inland" than where she'd found him, although the distinction wasn't substantial considering how little hard land Ahch-To was host to. Stacked stone huts encircled a sunken platform that may once have served as a common area. One of the huts at the head of the circle -- which Rey defined as that facing the steps which led back down -- was almost completely destroyed. All that remained of it were salt-stained, crumbling shin-high walls that dipped to as low as a single finger-width stone. It was in this blown-out hut that Luke had made his home.

Inside the walls stood a collapsible structure made of plasteel and synthcloth. To Rey it looked decadent because of its clearly intended purpose to house. It was actually considered out of date, Luke would explain, but to him it was just familiar, fraying edges and all.

Luke invited Rey to sit on the steps leading up to his hut but she declined, hesitant of making herself comfortable in such an unfamiliar place. Luke sat anyways, the edges of his robe rippling in the wind.

"I suppose you've come to tell me about it,” he said, gathering the cloth of his sleeves about his wrists. “About Han."

Rey met Luke's gaze and found none of the insecurity or rawness of Leia's. "No," she said, trying to understand it. "The General said you would already know."

"I did. Perhaps for longer than she would have expected." With this cryptic admission, Luke stood and turned, disappearing into his shelter. He reemerged with a handful of vacuum-sealed ration-packs and two ceramic dishes that could have been described as bowls with some minor creativity on the part of the teller.

“You don’t have to sit,” Luke said as he resumed his perch at the top step, “but you may want to eat. You’ve had a long few days, I can see them on you.”

Luke raised his eyebrows, apparently expecting a reply. Rey, less reluctant now in the face of his gentleness, took a seat on the cold stone at the other side of the step.

Losing herself to the short ritual, Rey remained silent as Luke prepared the rations. By the time her small instant loaf had risen, Rey felt ravenous, mouth watering in a shadow of a familiar hunger. How odd that, even here, by the sea in a cold wind, she could still feel the heat of Jakku's sun glancing over her shoulders.

When Luke offered Rey her bowl she took it with more force than was necessary. Despite this, Luke didn't react with the mild confusion that her eating habits seemed to instill in others, but watched serenely as Rey devoured her ration. Tears stung at her eyes for reasons she did not understand at the familiar yeasty dryness of the bread and the toughness of the protein supplement, but Rey paid them little mind. When she looked back up upon finishing, Rey realized that Luke must not have touched his ration until she was most of the way finished with hers. They sat in silence as Luke ate and Rey contemplated whether to pass on Leia's request.

"Sorry for the pause," Luke said, offering a hand to take Rey's bowl back, as though she ate slow enough for them to talk over the rations. "But it was a policy of my master's never to talk business over a meal. He thought it ‘uncivilized,’ as he liked to say."

“That’s alright.” Rey mumbled as Luke returned the dishes to his shelter. She wondered what his master would have thought of her habits.

“So,” Luke said a moment later with a rustle of robes and a gentle huff. “Are you going to ask or should I just give my answer?”

Rey started at his bluntness. “What do you mean?”

“I’m giving you the opportunity to pass on Leia’s request if you’d like, but I already have the answer.”

“How--? How do you know if I haven’t asked?” Rey’s shoulders shrunk inwards. Could all Force users read thoughts? She listened but could hear none of Luke’s and felt no terrible pressure on her mind, but perhaps--

“I know my sister well, Rey. She sent you to return me to her.”

“Oh.” It struck Rey like thumbing over a tender bruise -- the repeated realization that it was possible to know someone so intimately.

“She believes that I’m still susceptible to following strays, I think.” The corner of Luke’s mouth twitched up in a private chuckle, but his eyes looked tired.  “So?”

This time Rey was prepared.

“The General wants you to return with me to the base. She says it’s time. She says that the Resistance needs you in order to succeed.”

“Thank you, Rey. My answer is no.”

A long, unsure pause. “To which?”

“All and sundry.”

“You mean you won’t come?” A heat rose in Rey at how flippantly Luke seemed to respond. To have that thing, the feeling of wantedness and home and choose not to follow it when it called out for you-- it made her tongue recoil within her mouth and her lips pull tight across her teeth. “You won’t even see her?”

“She knows where I am, Rey. And she knows why.”

Rey could not keep the contempt from her voice when she snapped back. “I thought a Jedi would be above that--” she searched for the word and spat upon it, “pettiness.”  

But Luke seemed not to register the barb, simply tilting his head and holding her eyes as he responded coolly. “Perhaps I’m not a Jedi, then.”

Rey’s anger melted into a shiver at the realization. Luke’s face opened once again.

“Now you see the truth,” he added with something between a smile and a tired squint, “that I’m a myth after all.”

And despite the violence of it, Rey felt instead a sense of rightness in Luke’s words, as though something had shifted into place. She thought of what Han had said -- _It’s all true, all of it_ \-- but another voice trailed close after it, soft and Coruscanti, _...from a certain point of view._ She felt the past press up against her present, rearrange it into something less stable. Somewhere within her, a corridor opened. Her head ached.

And though she had not felt it descend, Rey felt the Force as it receded from where it had stitched her memory with Luke’s, like hands disappearing at the edge of her vision. Yet even as the presence of the Force dissipated, there remained a weight in Rey’s gut that the rations could not fully explain. Her eyes searched beyond the hills she could see, beyond Ahch-To’s horizon, searching for something she could secure herself to and finding even the memory of Jakku insufficient.

"What, then?"

"That's up to you, Rey."

"How?”

"Stay or go. I can help explain some things, but I can't be your master."

Rey’s eyes flickered back from the Outer Reaches, suddenly flint-like as though they might spark. "I don't want a master."

Relief made itself plain across Luke’s face along with something faintly hopeful. "Good."  

\--

For all of his friendliness Rey found Luke a relatively distant teacher, official or not.

On the first morning, he woke her with a knock on the outside of her shelter and a pre-prepared ration at the entrance. On the second morning the ration was still in its packaging. By the fifth morning there were no more knocks at all.

Some days he gave her less than fifty words instruction before heading out alone down one of the winding cliff-edge paths. Most days they did not speak at all except at meals.

His instructions were simple but often infuriating. One day it was, “Find a gull nest,” but the very next it was, “Find a gull nest _without_ tracking the gulls.”  

And usually it was about as exciting as that, too. He sent her out after animals at first, then sometimes just to their empty nests. After some minor initial difficulty and a few amused instructions (“How? With the _Force_ , Rey.”), Rey found Luke’s tasks almost comically easy. She called it tedious and simplistic and Luke’s response was at first a furrowed brow and another even more vague challenge. When she completed this the following day with similar ease and told him so, the furrowed brow remained but was accompanied by silence. Inevitably, the day after _these_ conversations she would be left entirely to her own devices. These she found worst and most tedious of all.

They kept at this minimal interaction for half a month before Rey’s patience -- once so steady and long-suffering -- finally broke.

“What are you explaining, exactly? With the bird-hunting?”

Luke’s now ever-creased forehead tightened momentarily, then smoothed for the first time since their first conversation.

“Truthfully?” Luke said, looking over his empty supper bowl to Rey, “I’m buying time.”

Once again, Rey found herself stunned by Luke’s inconsistency. “What for?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “You’re something I’ve not seen since--” a flash cut through Rey as Luke tried to dam up the memory, but she already knew. She could have sensed him anywhere, even in someone else’s thoughts.

“Since Kylo Ren?”

“Since Ben.”

\--

Three more tense days passed where Luke did not speak to Rey at all, even after their evening meal. Instead, she had to make conversation with him silently, turning those last two words over and over in her palms and holding them up to the light of Luke’s presence in the Force. Despite its brightness, she still could not see through them.

On the fourth day, Rey barely caught the sound of Luke’s knocking over the constant pounding of rain on her hut. Groggy and cold, she went to the entrance, barely cracking the door and shouting to him above the storm.

“Yes?”

“Stay in today,” he shouted back in a hoarse voice. “Tomorrow we’re going to work.”

Instinctively, Rey nodded. But it took more than a minute of watching Luke walk off -- rain kissing her face haphazardly and leaving icy pinpricks wherever it struck -- for his words to make sense.

She wondered if he had bought the time he needed or if it had simply run out.

\--

Luke’s “work,” Rey learned, was only slightly more interesting than his “lessons.”

Though she found he had been telling the truth when he offered to explain things, Rey didn’t necessarily feel better off for having them explained.

He gave a name to the current of noise that had plagued her on D’Qar but could not explain why it had been so excruciating for her.

( _“You have to be still to feel it, Rey,” he said with one eye cracked in her direction. “You have to reach out. It’s quiet.”_

_“Reach out to what?”_

_“My master called it the Living Force. It’s the thread that connects all living things. It’s the vibration that sounds between them.”_

_“I can hear that already,” she said. “I can always hear it.”_

_Luke’s other eye opened. “You can?”_ )

He told her that what she saw when she first touched the saber was a gift from the Force -- a vision of things past and possibly future -- but could not explain the meaning of its content.

( _“I can’t interpret for you why you saw that hallway.”_

_“But isn’t it your memory?”_

_“Yes, but it’s not my vision.”_ )

He even gave a name to the way she fought when she described it to him, but he could not teach it to her.

( _“And you were able to land more than one strike? It sounds as though you might be inclined to the second form, then. They called it Makashi, the Contention Form.”_

_“You said your master was a duelist. Did he teach it to you?”_

_Luke laughed. “No.”_

_“Why not?”_

_“He died before I finished Form I.”_ )

Eventually Luke abandoned his time-buying or simply stopped caring and told Rey to prepare for a new exercise. They would be attempting Force communication, like the Masters and Padawans of old. Luke did not mention this connection, but Rey sensed the longing in the way he described it, thin and long, reaching back for something it did not know.

They sat across from one another as when they meditated and Rey reached out, searching for the center of Luke’s effervescent light. Her focus honed, becoming needle-like, driven by a building pressure inside of her. _Seek_ , something whispered, _there is so much to find._ The pressure built, pushing like a moon-shadow covering the sun-- two suns, actually, blindingly hot, arcing slowly downward, and a feeling of staggering fear and confusion as they disappeared; they couldn’t possibly rise again the same tomorrow, but-- _This is your home_ , Rey thought, soundless, quaking.

Luke gasped, his Force presence shuddering, contracting, then suddenly pushing her away, pushing her out.

He breathed deeply, eyes cast down from hers.

“Rey,” Luke said, voice wavering over the edge dividing concern and reprimand. “Why did you do that?”

“I--” Rey stammered, opening her eyes, once again thrown off by Luke’s odd humor. “I did as you asked.”

The corners of Luke’s mouth worked up and down. “I asked you to see me--”

Rey cut him off. “That’s what I did. I found you.”

Luke considered her, clearly reading her expression, her body language, the bright, hard surface of Force that she emanated. When he spoke again his voice had a steadiness and resonance to it that unnerved Rey, like the deep vibrations of a landmark dune, shifting where you cannot see in order to stay standing. “Finding and seeing are two very different things,” he said, not looking away from Rey’s eyes, still watching. He enunciated his words carefully, voice taking on a depth she hadn’t heard from him before. “You weren’t seeing, you were looking for. Do you understand the difference?”

Rey considered what he was saying, listening for the buzz behind his calm. She felt that pressure, probed its familiarity to both her and Luke. Realization dawned and Rey felt-- Rey felt a wide nothingness where her reaction ought to have been.

After a few moments of silence Luke coughed. His voice had returned from its sand-song calm to a delicate levity, dancing nervously over a question: “How did you learn to do that? It’s a rare skill.”

“I didn’t,” Rey said, plainly.

“No?”

“No.”

\--

Eventually, with time and distance they were able to speak through the Force without it being entirely overwhelming for Luke. They talked about the weather, about how Leia had looked when Rey last saw her, about what it might feel like to be dry for more than two hours at a time. They talked about that first, disastrous attempt at Force communication.

_What did it feel like?_ Rey asked. _When I found you?_

_Like a needle_ , he thought, _burrowing deep._

_And when I tried to speak?_

_Like something huge and stationary was suddenly on me._ Luke answered. _Like a wave crashing over my head._

_And what does a wave feel like?_

_Like…_ images, sensations. An abstraction of powerlessness, elation, terror, unity. All of these at once. _Well, I suppose you’ve met him._ Rather than a name, Luke imagined a figure in black robes, no larger than a child: a hybrid image. He communicated a Force-sense Rey knew all too well.

She recoiled as if burned, drawing back, spirit hissing. _You don’t mean that._

Luke did not answer.

\--

They passed weeks in silence like this, speaking only internally and less in words as time went on. They communicated the landscape through their experiences of it -- wind, spray, sun, rock -- but they avoided mentioning the waves, the water of their shared visions becoming impossibly, eerily calm.

It was only when she was alone that Rey allowed herself to see them, unwilling and unable to face Luke’s imagined gaze upon a conscience that felt inexplicably guilty. When she could sense Luke sleeping, she often went out to watch the choppy water, battered by the spray of the ocean in cold night air. She searched for that hybrid feeling, the helplessness and unity, the child in heavy robes. Though she had not lived near water and though her garments had always been light, she felt a discomforting familiarity in these ghost-visions Luke supplied. That same point of triangulation glimmered in the distance, pulled her back in space and time to a feeling she had on the _Falcon_ , the first twitch of that now-incessant spot that had throbbed on and off ever since Starkiller. It had sounded like someone calling her name, not quite her name, but close...

\--

**\- 00, 22:50.28   [** **_Millennium Falcon_ ** **/** **_The Finalizer_ ** **]**

\--

Rey’s heart was still beating fast as the last of the adrenaline burned itself up in her veins and hot steam coiled up from the protesting parts in front of her through her hair. Her confidence with engines took the edge off this new crisis, but the urgency and the exhilaration of it kept her mind racing from one potential problem to the next, a dozen puzzle pieces and bits of circuitry clicking into place in her head. The freighter was kriffing old, but it would fly with the help of her hurried, mid-flight repairs.

“It's the motivator! Grab me a Harris wrench--”

\---

Kylo Ren stood still against the darkness of space filling the view-port. At his back, a field of red and blue pinpricks emanated from the monitors that lined the ship walls. An officer approached.

“Sir. We were unable to acquire the droid on Jakku. It escaped capture aboard a stolen Corellian YT model freighter.” Despite his discipline, the lieutenant’s voice vibrated with fear. Lieutenant Mitaka, Ren remembered, taking in the quivering cheeks and pained expression. One of Hux’s toadies, and he looked it.

“The droid... stole a freighter?” He demanded.

“Not exactly, sir. It had help.” Kylo Ren waited, his frustration simmering, and watched Mitaka swallow nervously. “We have no confirmation, but we believe FN-2187 may have been helped in the escape--”

Anger coursed down through his arm and his lightsaber sung to life beside him. Launching the shivering red blade over his head, he arced down into the surface of the closest wall of screens, which flickered out under his onslaught. The slashes grew tighter as he pulled the anger back towards his center, further and further inward, until it was a shimmering singularity, an aching needlepoint between his ribs. His hand stilled, and he extinguished his lightsaber. The acrid smell of ozone hung heavy in the enclosed space, and the glow of dozens of angry, smoldering gashes filled his vision.

“Anything else?”

“The two were accompanied by a girl.”

The statement left the officer’s mouth and came to a halt in the charged air between them. Kylo Ren felt the heavy-handed sheen of the Force overlaying those simple words, and he bristled. It was an echo that sounded underneath the officer’s voice, lending it the recognizable stink of fate. The Force bared its teeth at him in a mocking grin, and underneath his visor, Kylo Ren ground his teeth.

Stretching his gloved hand out in a claw, he yanked the officer towards his waiting grasp. The Force crackled around the pair, an echo of harsh laughter in Kylo Ren’s ear.

“What girl?” He ground out.

A cursory glance through his thoughts revealed that the man had nothing for him. _A scavenger from Jakku. Capable, or lucky_. But he’d heard enough stories in his childhood to know that luck didn’t exist.

_There is only the will of Force_ , Luke Skywalker had told Ben Organa, the blue of his eyes like still water.

Kylo Ren released his grasp and stalked over to the viewport, pouring his attention out into the darkness, searching.

And, there, a bright, yellow beacon blazing distantly but steadily, as if just waiting for him to look upon it. He held it carefully in his mind, and as he drew closer, it bled warmth like a tiny sun. There was something shockingly familiar about it, and he concentrated, delved in – there was an engine drone, so unlike the sleek hum of the First Order battlecruiser, there was a twisting maze of hallway that he knew by heart, there was a bunk with the initials B. O. carved into the ceiling above the pillow – and there was the girl, bright and hard, crouched in the heart of the ship, scavenging amongst the graveyard of a past life.

He drew in a sharp breath.

\---

Rey’s thoughts were interrupted by a sudden, vague discomfort. She rolled her shoulders and tried to refocus on the toolbox in front of her, but a prickle at the back of her neck persisted. She had the distinct feeling of being observed. But when she turned, there was no sign of the source of her perturbation. Just Finn, behind her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **A note on the timestamps:** The timeline is a bit all over the place! We struggled with how to communicate it (and it's obviously not a perfect system), but **you can keep track of where you are by the timestamps at the beginning of the sections.** The mechanism is set to 00, 00:00.00 during the interrogation scene, when the mind meld happens, and timestamps with a "+" indicate time after that (as in + 00, 04:37.40 [ D’Qar ], which is 4 hours, 37 minutes, and 40 seconds after the mind meld) and timestamps with a "-" indicate time before it (as in the "What girl?" scene that appears at the end of the chapter, - 00, 22:50.28 [ Millennium Falcon / The Finalizer ], which I guessed/headcanoned to be 22 hours, 50 minutes, and 28 seconds before the interrogation, about a day out).
> 
> Welcome to the fic! Thank you guys for tuning into chapter 1, the first third of the first completion! 
> 
> The fic has four movements that will be split into ten chapters that will be serialized as they are completed. If any of you are familiar with tarot or numerology, you may see what we're going for with this format, but if not that's okay, just subscribe and come see the whole thing unfold. This movement will update every other Friday leading up to the release of TLJ and we'll check in with you after that happens. Regardless of what goes on in canon, the fic will continue, just as canon-divergent rather than canon-compliant. We've put waaaay too much work into it so far not to. 
> 
> If you have any questions, feel free to hit kelly up on tumblr @ reyleaux. We like kudos but we loooooove your comments, so please let us know what you're thinking!


	2. The First Completion: Afterimage (II)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An encounter; Kylo Ren begins to unravel.
> 
> "He considered the tendency of the eye to create afterimages of extreme significance and indeed generalized it as 'The Law of Required Change.' This law states that as a strong impression is received, its complement is produced by the individual ... thus the appearance of an afterimage, tears when joyful, and so on." - Zajonc, pp.327-328

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Thanksgiving to our American readers (and anybody else out there interested in eating an insane amount of tasty food)! Here's an early update because gretta and I will be passed out on green bean casserole and sweet potato souffle for the next three days. I hope you like it! 
> 
> ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) I certainly do. 
> 
> **A note on the timestamps:** The timeline is a bit all over the place! We struggled with how to communicate it (and it's obviously not a perfect system), but you can keep track of where you are by the **timestamps at the beginning of the sections.** The mechanism is set to 00, 00:00.00 during the interrogation scene, when the mind meld happens, and timestamps with a "+" indicate time after that (as in + 00, 04:37.40 [ D’Qar ], which is 4 hours, 37 minutes, and 40 seconds after the mind meld) and timestamps with a "-" indicate time before it (as in the "What girl?" scene that appears at the end of the chapter, - 00, 22:50.28 [ Millennium Falcon / The Finalizer ], which I guessed/headcanoned to be 22 hours, 50 minutes, and 28 seconds before the interrogation, about a day out).

**II**

**\--**

**\+ 34, 08:45.00  [ D’Qar ]**

\--

In the end, Luke let Rey go with little more than a stiff hug and a well-wish. She did not prod him or beg him, having realized that fighting with him was like fighting with water. Wherever she pressed he would merely find a way around. When Leia asked, Rey resolved to answer honestly: Luke would offer nothing but his name, and Leia already had that.

This, of course, enraged Leia. In the war room, she ranted and raved about her brother, despite Rey’s presence. She called him a fool and a stranger and a traitor in her frustration, putting together and picking apart retrieval missions that Rey did not expect to materialize. But she did not cry or despair, which Luke had warned Rey of. “Hard-headed,” he said, “and incapable of grieving.” He confessed, for Rey’s elucidation, that he’d seen her cry exactly once and it had not been after the destruction of Alderaan. He’d seen her murder far more often.

Eventually Leia’s steam wore out, and before long Rey was being released from debrief and sent back to her bunk. It was not the same one as before, but it could have been for all that it looked the same. Relatively refreshed from a long hyperspace sleep and restless from so many weeks spent nearly alone, Rey decided against bed. Instead, she ventured out to the med bay.

Rey palmed open the door to find a silent, shadowed room beyond. Some machines blinked softly, idle, save for the bed in the corner where a single patient snored, her right leg hoisted up in traction. Finn’s bed was empty.

A dull, nauseating swell of panic radiated from Rey’s abdomen to her extremities.

Rey ran from the med bay, tearing down the hall towards Recreation. He had to be there, or someone who knew where he would be. An answer, at least. Head lowered and breathing hard, she threw a sweeping hand out towards the door to Rec. The door panel squealed in its tracks as she forced it open manually.

Rey burst into the room beyond. A heavy silence greeted her.

Generally, those just getting off shift or waiting to start gathered in Recreation to de-stress and shrug off the remnants of sleep, collecting in small groups on couches and standing. All commiserated, many laughed.

Now, though, they stared dumbly, shocked by the noise. 

Snap Wexley offered her a nervous greeting from a nearby couch. “Rey,” he said, “hi.”

“Where is Finn?” Rey asked. 

Snap raised a hand and scratched the back of his head, expression caught between a squint and a grimace. “Oh, the General didn’t tell you?”

“No. Where is he?”

“He’s running a press junket through the core. The Rebel ‘Trooper, the one who got out, you know?”

“Oh,” Rey said. She didn’t.

“Yeah,” said Snap, voice measured and conspicuously even, “he’s only about halfway done, but he’ll be back.”

A pause passed between them and all the room. “Soon,” he added. “He’ll be back soon. You can ask Connix for his contacts if you want to comm him.”

“Oh,” Rey said again. “Okay.”

“It’s, uh, good to have you back, though.” Snap said this as though it were a question and not an assurance.

Rey nodded and left the way she had come, the open door raining a small shower of sparks behind her. When she had gone, conversation resumed.

\--

The next day, Rey began by refusing to leave her bed, then refusing to leave her room even after she had risen. She stretched and curled among the sheets, restless but defiant. She would not go to breakfast in the mess and face the others or their silent stares.

Rey turned and turned, watching the chrono until she could no longer bear it. She got up. She dressed.

She undressed, she washed, she dressed again.

By noontime, Rey was pacing back and forth and losing her patience. Her stomach grumbled every few minutes, growing louder every time. And though Rey _knew_ she had withstood worse hunger, the temptation to eat gnawed at her. She felt weakened, tired, but anxious. Her body wanted the food and she knew she was being silly. But every time she plucked up her courage and turned toward the door she would turn away again, having misplaced her chrono or forgotten to remake her cot, or feeling the sudden, anxious need to re-braid her hair again and again.

Miserable around 1400, she edged out a blind escape, throwing a recently folded pair of coveralls against the wall and pushing herself out the door with the momentum. Through her door, down the hallway, rushing towards the mess before she could realize she was doing it and lose her nerve.

The mess hall was not empty as she had hoped it would be. A few familiar faces lingered at a table, Jessika Pava among them. A friend of Poe’s and a fellow pilot, she recalled, noting her calloused hands and messily-chopped hair.

Rey gathered a tray quickly, nervously filling a bowl with soup from a dispenser and retrieving a slice of quick-bread from the basket placed beside it. She turned her back on the occupied table and hurried towards the back of the caf, hoping to satisfy her hunger without drawing the attention of Jess and her mechanic.

“Rey!” Jess called.

 _Kriff it,_ Rey thought, eyes rolling back. So this is the kind of day it would be.

“Rey,” Jess repeated, waving Rey over, “here, come sit.”

Rey grimaced, but came at her call. Silently, she placed her tray down and, without preamble, began to shovel soup into her mouth.

“So,” Jess said, turning a fork over in her fingers, “turns out you managed to break the door to the rec room last night.”

“Oh,” Rey said, having nothing else to say. “I’m sorry.”

“No, no worries. It’s not that big of a deal, a lot worse stuff is broken. But it was pretty impressive. I’ve never seen anything like that before, you didn’t even have to touch it.”

“Yeah,” agreed a young woman on Jess’ right. She had auburn hair in two loose braids and golden-brown eyes. “Are you, like, a Jedi now? With Force powers and everything?”

It was friendly, Rey knew, the kind of good-natured ribbing that meant they liked you well enough to overstep their bounds, but Rey felt uncomfortable, scrutinized. She could not prevent the way her mouth twisted.

“No,” she said shortly, turning back to her soup. A Jedi? What did this mechanic know about Jedi? What did she know of the Force?

The smile slid off of the woman’s face, looking between her and Jess as if searching for an explanation. Jess shrugged minutely, and Rey felt the discomfort in their faces without turning to look. It hung heavy over the table and remained there as Rey ate the rest of her soup and bread in silence.

\--

**\+ 37, 15:00.35  [ D’Qar ]**

\--

Rey was awoken by a screaming buzz that had her thrashing off her blanket and grabbing for her lightsaber. A light pulsed above her chrono in a signal to report for orders.

She dressed as quickly as possible and packed nothing but her small blaster on one hip and her saber on the other, satisfied that the blaster looked sufficiently un-Jedi-like.

\--

It was an attack on a satellite base, a First Order blitzkrieg that easily overwhelmed the outer defenses of the small, rocky moon and left a handful of Resistance members barricaded in the inner structures, buying time.

Rey gathered with Poe and a few others in the war room for the brief. They were to be sent out immediately. In truth, it was less of a brief and more of a pep-talk for a mission that was equal parts straightforward and vague.

“We’ll get them out of there,” Poe had said, stony faced in the harsh light of the war room, ever the stolid optimist but rarely one to consider or calculate risk.  

Leia did not seem to be listening, but spoke to the air in front of her, between her mouth and loosely fisted left hand.

“This has got to be an intimidation move. There’s nothing out there. They’re just contesting our space--” She trailed off into thought, eyes trained on the holo in front of her. She considered the problem silently.

Rey realized how still the war room was at this hour, most of the motion in it entirely digital. In the stillness she counted her party, around thirty of them in total, and realized her own curious lack of fear.

At last, Leia turned to them, face serious, uncertainty hovering behind her eyes. “This isn’t the big offensive we expected to follow Starkiller. Be careful.”

The message was clear: If you can’t do it without casualty, don’t do it. We have few enough of you already.

Rey nodded, sensing the whisper of a name hovering in the air between them, unspoken. Gooseflesh broke out over her arms.

\--

She was in the landing party, as the carrier ship touched down roughly with a deafening rattle that shook through the frame and up her planted limbs. The cargo doors groaned open before her onto the bleak, rocky terrain. A heavy mist hung low to the ground.

“Low vis, hang close!” Poe called, and the squad moved out, weapons at the ready.

Rey brought up the rear, her hand hovering above her hip and her mind stretching outward, pouring over the shape of the terrain. There was a heavy charge hanging in the air, an electrical storm slowly crawling across the far surface of the moon, anticipation hovering over the horizon. She let it wash over her, heartbeat and breath evening into a focused rhythm, her mind’s eye trained on something obscured beyond a distant ridge. It was waiting for her, a kind of singing that set the delicate webbing of the living Force around her ablaze. A shimmering thing, coiled around the stem of her skull, thrilled at it and a shiver passed down her spine. But she didn’t go running towards it, stayed in formation at the tail of the group and sent a message up through the party to their leader: _Over the far ridge, be ready._

The fighting broke out as it should, a sort of choreography that was becoming natural to her, as comprehensible as the tides and the breeding patterns of the blue-beaked osprey of Ahch-To. The fog was illuminated with blaster fire and the chaotic shouts of the combatants. Whatever was waiting for her was closer now, just a bit further ahead and she advanced carefully across the battlefield to the front of the squad, locked onto it -- that singing in the Force -- like a homing beacon. There was an aching familiarity to the space it took up in her mind, like the weight of a smooth beach stone that had been tugging restlessly at her pocket since -- since when? Since returning from Ach-To? No, before that.

She knew with absolute certainty what she was about to find.

But when the shrieking red blade cut through the obscurity of the fog, she still lost her breath, her stomach churning in a wave of nerves. Rey sunk into a crouch and threw herself into the fray, letting the Force flow through her trembling limbs and pull her into a smooth defensive rhythm. She crouched for cover to breathe and listened for a break in the blaster fire, then up -- where she squeezed off a few shots and, like she knew exactly when the next volley would come before it did, fell back to cover.

This rhythm -- the listening, rising, killing, and falling back -- pulled seconds into minutes until Rey _felt_ herself do it more than she _did_ it. The blaster rested warm and heavy in her hands, and although it was responsive and maneuverable -- although it was cleaned, greased, and up to specs -- felt like dead weight. She launched herself over her cover, charging the closest storm trooper and smashing the butt of the blaster into their helmet hard enough to put them on their back, dazed. She turned the blaster in her hands and squeezed the trigger. From across the battlefield, a pair of eyes landed heavily on her. Her face turned away from the body of the soldier beneath her to meet them.

Kylo Ren stood alone at the far edge of the battlefield, flanked only by the heavy, sluggish fog that pulled at the edges of his long, dark robes, and his entire body turned to her, locked on. Her stomach turned, a cold sweat breaking out across the back of her neck.

This was not nerves, she realized, but a sick kind of excitement.

Somehow the sound of his saber was amplified in her ear, the high frequency whine of it setting her teeth on edge. His mask tilted minutely down and to the side, pantomiming a gaze at the unlit lightsaber on her belt. Then back to her face, head still tilted a degree to the side in question. Grinding her teeth against the discordant buzz, Rey began a slow, measured flank, eyes trained on his dark figure. She drew herself out of the crossfire to the perimeter of the fighting. On the far side of the skirmish, Kylo Ren mirrored her movements, turning their momentary notice into a stronger but uncertain orbit. Like an itch, she found her hand drawn unconsciously to the handle at her hip and, giving in, she withdrew the ridged metal. The glittering black face of the mask watched her curiously. A sluice of red light from a blaster passed over the eyes.

As the blade came humming to life in her grip, the noise in Rey’s head receded and the scene around her -- the very air itself -- stilled as though for a deep breath. Time seemed to slow. Rey refocused her gaze on the man in black circling from across the uneven ground, mask still trained toward her. Now, in the calm that came over her, the Force flattening itself against the shape of her mind, she could see him with a sort of double vision, could see shades of him that moved out of step, their previous synchronicity falling apart under her eye. A shimmering, layering effect: she saw the monstrous, lurching gait, she saw the hunched, awkward curl of wide shoulders, she saw something boyish and wide eyed at about knee height for a moment before it disappeared back into the conglomeration of Kylo Ren and his shadowy shroud of robes. A thought came to her softly, unbidden -- a suggestion, perhaps -- of herself wading into the restless waters of Ahch-To at night, of white seafoam surging up from the churning black waters to caress the tan skin of her calf, made pale by moonlight.

\---

The crackling of a comm in her ear disrupted Rey’s momentary vision, the urgency and seriousness in Poe’s voice at odds with the idea of water and her moving through it.

“Black Leader to Black Team, fall back. Scan for casualties and meet at the drop-off,” he sounded out of breath. Rey knew the threat his tone conveyed, but she did not feel it as acutely as she expected, could not quite reach it from where her mind lingered, at the edge of the sea. The blast of a sticky grenade reverberated in the distance, then came crashing again over the comm, drawing Rey’s attention away from the black mass of Kylo Ren. Poe drew a heavy breath in her ear and reiterated his order, yelling now. “Fall back!”

Rey obeyed without even looking back, still able to feel him across the blasted-out plain well enough to know that he watched her retreat. Against every instinct for self-preservation she had nearly died to internalize, she was galled at the thought. She should not retreat from him. Next time, he would retreat from _her_ , if he were even lucky enough to survive their meeting.

\---

He felt the sharp, bright edges of her leaving. What had become a familiar, aching welt in his awareness cut through the dark of space and left a pain like a missing tooth as the Resistance carrier was slingshotted away from the moon. Under Dameron’s capable hand, no doubt. Kylo Ren turned to the troopers assembled behind him.

“Division One-Alpha, get the casualties to the transport,” he droned out through the voice modulator. “One-Beta, clear the base. Restrain anyone left alive, they’ll be joining us on the trip back to Kamino.”

The commands were met with uncertain silence, some anxious shuffling. CR-2081 turned his head slightly to look down the row, before snapping back into attention when he felt Kylo’s gaze on him. His heartbeat raced clumsily in the air between them. _Fresh off training, has potential_ , Phasma had reported.

Kylo Ren tilted his head. A few more heartbeats picked up their pace.

“That’s all,” he added dryly.

The stormtroopers quickly split off to their tasks and, left alone, Kylo Ren turned his attention back to the horizon. An electrical storm was starting to emerge over the cliff face to the west, bearing down on the battleground. It would soon flush the blood from the rocky ground. He watched the roiling thunderheads, stained rust-brown and angry shades of green, and-- _there_ , a mounting rumble of voices, distant now, but growing louder.

A cold sweat broke out across his encased brow and dread pooled heavily in his stomach. Racing ahead of the storm, the Force was soon upon him, a dull grey wave closing over his head. Kylo struggled to draw in breath, hands reaching out, grasping, but the landscape he had just occupied receded. Harsh voices rang in his ears, their words indistinct and piled on top of each other. This was the noxious smog of Time. His head was ringing with it.

Above him, a window of cold light opened, expanding to fill his vision, pressing against his eyes till he saw spots. The voices settled into a buzz, and soon the spots began to take on shapes.

First, pieces of Alderaan glittering against the empty blackness. Then, tiny white flowers shaped like stars tangled in soft, dark hair.

A voice emerged from the buzz, layering over itself -- a doubled, filial sound: _I know. I know, I know. I know._

_I know there is --_

_I know._

Rain and thunder stained red by fire. _You were the Chosen One! --_

_I know._

Fields of wildflowers washed in the light of three moons. _Don’t go._

There was blood on his hands -- whose hands? There was a Jedi temple crumbling behind him, First Order drones streaking overhead. Luke Skywalker was a warning light blinking as he broke atmo. _Time to go, kid_.

There was blood on his hands.

His hands reached up, skimming over smooth skin stretched out above him. The shape of Rey, breasts exposed and head thrown back, formed a column of light against a sea of stars, her mouth opening as if in slow motion, drawing air into a gasp. The light stretched up along the uninterrupted line of her throat into the dark far above. Around them, columns of white stone glowed with the same light, extended -- a pale forest in the dark.

He was on his back in the snow. There was blood dripping down his face, warm and metallic on his tongue.

There was blood on his hands.

The clouds opened, a cold rain pouring down, a crack of thunder. Kylo stared out across the barren rock that took shape once again as his eyes begin to focus. He raised his hands in front of him, watching water bead on the black leather.

A notion sprung up within him -- the idea of rain on his skin -- and saw itself crushed before it reached the body it intended to speak to. Shame rushed to fill the space as Kylo Ren remembered his master -- his _mentor_ \-- and his place. He commed the troops with a barked order to finish their tasks, felt the faint piquing of anxious heartbeats, and returned to the business of waging war, skin and rain alike forgotten.

\--

**\+ 37, 11:10.00 [ Kamino, First Order Base ]**

\--

The rain on Kamino was deafening. Even from deep within the rebuilt husk of the cloning facility, Kylo Ren could hear the rain like a constant drumming beneath the air cycling, beneath the intercom system, beneath everything.

Ren had trudged to his quarters with loud, wet steps, trailing brackish water and the attention of anxious troopers behind him. He entered the bare cell that served as his commander’s quarters with hands already flying to his neck to pull viciously at the wet fabric of his robes. Wet leather scrabbled against wet monks-cloth fruitlessly for several seconds, Ren feeling its weight and increased elasticity as he pulled it tight enough to cut into his throat. Yes, he thought, that felt good, he hated it. That made sense. He began to calm as the tension of the cowl shifted along the ridges of his esophageal cartilage. A tightening, as Ren cut his own air off, then was calm enough to move the fingers away, release the helmet, and drive it with a strong downward swing into the far wall.

Ren breathed in the clammy air of the cell, not nearly as dehumidified as in Hux’s quarters, surely, and resisted the urge to tear his robes from his body. He needed clarity -- needed to look back into the storm, master the visions that haunted him still, of the voices and the damned flowers and-- And the columns, the vision of the scavenger--

Ren pounded a fist into the door of the cell, then the other. Words and concept eluded him when he thought of that and he was left with a tightness inside his body, a shaking in the muscle that turned his stomach and made him sick. He couldn’t face it now. He needed pain to make it clear if it were injury or conquest that shook him.

He began a series of slow but punishing katas, knowing that he would not move fast enough to counteract the cold of the wet cloth and knowing that his hunger would soon catch up to him as he worked. His joints ached as he moved from each formation to the next, holding and shivering in each one so long that the tendons themselves refused to let go as they ought to. He slipped once, as he moved from a low, wide stance back to standing and crumpled on the duracrete floor of the cell, shaking as his blood sugar plummeted and letting the shame of his failure course through him. He forced himself through it, leaning on a cold, nameless hatred he harbored for his body, thinking of the disappointment he would see in his master’s eyes to watch him fail such a simple task.

He began again.

An hour or more later, sliding towards delirium, Kylo Ren slipped from his position to the floor once again, spent. He shivered within his still-wet robes and struggled to grip his own mind with white knuckles. The storm played out over him again and he was awash in the memory.

The beginning of this he knew, knew it and his own resistance to it. Temptations, his master called them, dreams to distract him from the reality of things. The voices, the visions. So Ren mastered himself over them despite their insistence. He held his conviction in a vice, driving back. _No one knows. No one is chosen. The blood is how you own it._

He knew this to be true. He knew it in the sacred space of his mind beyond his body, the temple his master had built in him.

Then the second wave. The scavenger over him, in him, around him. He felt like he might vomit against the power of it. But the vision could not raise the same shaking as before.

Instead, below it, there was a sparking. Something more like curiosity and less like violence. Something like anticipation, like the heated eagerness for sleep that filled him with pleasure at the end of training. It whispered about his inability to eradicate that pleasure and the paradox of his reaction to it -- his master’s disgust, his own feeling of sudden strength. There was a sustaining-- something in the strength of her back and --

The vision burst apart inside him, across him.

It shattered like glass, cutting him on its edges, it told him  
of the columns holding in and holding up,  
                                                                        it showed a body in ruins, the beauty in  
               its standing, revealed its smoothness despite the                stain --  
Momentarily, there was the acceptance of pain and                             leaving, pain's   
  leaving          He held his hands before his face (and leaving to go to)  
               they are clean, his hands are

_clean_

       (being where)                           the approach of the ceiling, a building, a  
                                                                                                                                crashing -- shame’s horizon,  
the realization of its ending.                            He cannot taste the blood even if he licks  
his fingers, he cannot even _imagine_  
                                                        the leaving of the pain, of something else filling its absence:               the     
substance of it, (of her) an awareness of his own substance, sustaining—

\--

There, a command: like the soft, whispered prickling of his skin -- immeasurable, meaningless -- saying, _survive_ , saying, _be sustained_.

And there: the soft, sobbing response.


	3. The First Completion: Afterimage (III)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finn returns. A hand. An encounter, concession.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys, hope you have as much fun with this one as I did. First Finn appearance of the story and finally, a real meeting. :))))) 
> 
> As more and more TLJ promo has come out, we've realized that it looks like the movie is...skimming pretty closely to our plans for this story in terms of theme and throughline. It's been validating and amazing to see, but also totally surreal. Hey, Rian, did you hack our google docs? We're getting a bit concerned. 
> 
> That said, there are some things planned for this fic that I can _absolutely guarantee_ wouldn't make it into a Disney movie, so I promise we will still have some surprises for you in the next completion.

**III**

**\--**

**+52, 20:48.32 [ D’Qar ]**

\--

It had been a few standard weeks since their failed mission to the outer rim had returned empty handed, and activity on the front had been quiet. Diplomatic missions and some intel gathering kept a steady stream of traffic moving through the war room, but everyone seemed grounded - in the way they talked tactics and outcomes, in the measured way they ate their food, in their ease with each other at the table.

Everyone, of course, but Rey.

A subdued anxiety crouched in the alcoves and halls, in the mess, in the rec room, in the hangars, and Rey could feel it in the eyes that landed on her when her back was turned. They were frightened and nervous about the war, yes, but this was the overtone that came through clear. That other feeling, that crouching thing, was harder to distinguish. It seemed to follow her on the gaze of a young mechanic or executive officer, then vanished suddenly as if fleeing. It came out in the low timbre of whispers across a room or behind a door then died away to nothing.

On a particular morning, Rey went restlessly from the grey concrete of her bunk through the rest of the compound. The cool climate-controlled air was making her sluggish and irritable on the way to Leia’s office, causing her to curl in on herself against the cold and the dull ache in her fingers and toes.

She had forgotten all about the convoy that was returning that day, and the fact that it held--

“Finn!” Rey shouted as she spotted him standing near the desk. She rushed into the room and into Finn’s arms in a quick embrace. The feeling of him buzzed in the Force around her - Light and energetic, just like he was on the outside.

They squeezed one another for a moment, then pulled back to see the other’s face, already smiling.

He had missed her, she could tell. Well, she had missed him, too. Rey had missed his hope and steadiness, and the way he never looked at her with trepidation, like an animal whose path the others were afraid to cross.

Leia stood behind the desk, emanating peace and a little smile of _pleased_. After a moment, Rey turned to her, waiting for instruction.

“So what’s the mission?” Finn asked for the both of them. “New intel or…” The thought trailed off.

Leia crossed her arms and uncrossed them, palms pressing slightly up in the air before her. “Go,” she said in her weathered, kind way, “have a walk. You two deserve a break.”

Rey looked uncertain, but delighted. “Are you sure?” Finn asked.

“Don’t make me tell you twice,” Leia said, jokingly stern, and gestured a shooing motion towards the door.

The only feeling Rey hated more than the sterile cold of the base’s air conditioning was the humid heat of D’Qar in full day, thick and hot as soup. But being with Finn, she found she didn’t mind it nearly as much. Sweat dripped down her back as they walked side-by-side, a feeling like a clasped hand in the Force between them.

“So, you never told me, what was he like?” Finn asked her, obviously attempting to conceal his smile but failing miserably.

“Luke?” Rey asked back, though she hardly needed to.

“Yeah,” Finn said, wistfulness overtaking his voice, “Luke Skywalker.”

The sun cut through the trees they walked under, flashing in Rey’s eyes like a strobe.

“I don’t know,” she said, “calm. Old.”

Finn laughed, no doubt imagining it for himself, though Rey could not shake the feeling he wasn’t fully understanding.

“Sad,” she said, quietly. “There was something really sad about him.”

Finn pressed his lips together in a considering sound. No doubt he could imagine that. He’d known a kind of exile, too, hadn’t he? He hummed and thought, letting silence move between them comfortably, like a breeze moving through Rey’s old home, clearing out the dust and freshening the air.

“When is he coming?”

“Coming?”

“Yeah, here, to the Resistance,” Finn said, as though it were obvious.

“He’s--” Rey paused, confused that Finn didn’t know. “He’s not.”

Finn slowed, then stopped. Looking at Rey with something she could only call consternation, he seemed to wait for an answer.

“He’s not coming here, Finn, not soon, maybe not ever.”

His brows worked as he thought it over, coming to knit above his eyes. At last, he asked, “Why?”

Rey paused, unsure what to say. _Why?_ She had never asked him herself, had never bothered to try to understand it in words. Just images. Just waves crashing over her again and again as the sun set on their training sessions.

She thought of their very first meeting.

“It’s not his fight anymore,” Rey said, words not quite right but the closest thing she had to good enough. “I tried to offer him this,” she said, pulling the saber off her belt and holding it towards Finn as she had done with Luke.“But he wouldn’t take it. He wouldn’t even hold it. He said it wasn’t his weapon anymore. None of these--” Rey gestured to her blaster and Finn’s at their respective hips, “are his weapons anymore.”

She was leaving something out, of course. That small ghost that seemed to lurk behind each rock and behind Luke’s eyes as he watched her work.

Finn seemed to withdraw -- and would be withdrawn throughout the next few days -- but he didn’t break away, never stopped asking questions.

“But this is important,” he said, “and we could use someone like him, with his experience and--”

And his name, Rey thought.

“He knows that, Finn, but--” She wanted to explain.

“But what? We need _help_ , Rey. We need his help.” He pleaded with her as though he were talking to Luke. She thought for a flash that it would have been better to wait, to send him in her stead. She hadn’t even thought then that she _could_ plead, let alone that she should, let alone _how_. Maybe for all her tactical genius, Leia had made a mistake. Rey had never been the right person to send.

Except, said her memories of Ahch-To. Except that she knew why Luke had refused. Except that she had felt those reasons all around him and on him, like their own ecosystem, driving him through each day.

“It’s-- It’s not that he won’t help,” she said, “it’s that he can’t.”

“What does that mean?” Finn accused, disbelieving. “What do you mean ‘can’t’?”

“I don’t know.”

Finn’s brows knitted together.

“I do know, but I don’t know how to say it. He’s so...heavy, somehow. He doesn’t have anything left to give. It won’t let him.”

“It?”

“The Force. It’s just, over for him. The fight is over.”

She realized, trying to say it -- struggling through the sheer _inadequacy_ of the words -- what it had been, that deep calm hanging around Luke. The Force, like a shroud. Like a blanket of lead. Luke had heard it like Rey did when it called to her from the saber. _Yours_ , it had said with the strength of a thousand voices, undeniable weight bearing down on her, forcing open a doorway, forcing her through. Just as it now clung to Luke and commanded, _Enough_.

Finn, looking healthy and clear-headed in the sunlight, did not understand. Though Rey could see him try to, he couldn’t.

“Leia already knows,” Rey said. “She was _so_ mad, but she-” Rey faltered, knowing how it sounded to Finn to admit this of their general, “she let it go.”

Working his mouth in concentration, Finn mulled it over. Rey could see the ever-springing hope in him reformulating, trying to figure out a way around this. He would go implore Luke himself, or they would lure him back somehow, or any one of a thousand plans only Finn was genius and reckless enough to make work. Maybe not right now, but soon.

“Okay,” he said at last, letting it rest. “Okay.”

The tension Rey had not even realized was building in her back and shoulders suddenly released. They breathed for a moment.

Finn held out his hand between them. “C’mon, let’s take that break General Organa ordered.”

“Yeah?” Rey said.

“Yeah. And then I’m going to make you show me all of your cool new lightsaber moves.”

A tiny, warm smile wormed its way from Rey’s chest up to her mouth, quirking it up at the corners. She took his hand. Once more for old time’s sake, so the saying went. “Yeah, okay.”

\--

Two days later, Finn shipped out again on another diplomatic mission to the Outer Rim. He had said something about destabilizing and deprogramming, but Rey had to admit, she didn’t fully understand it. All of that - the persuasion and the people - was Finn’s domain, not hers.

As it was, she could barely keep it together in the company of a few Resistance members without becoming withdrawn and subtly hostile. She felt beat down by their noise and energy and the closenesses that snaked between them all.

And all of these, though mitigated by Finn’s reassuring presence, rushed back full-force as Rey felt him break atmo. Off to purpose and Light, she knew, but it was hard not to feel abandoned in the space he left behind.

Abandoned by all but the clamoring sounds of the mess hall and her constant companion, a shade lurking, unspoken, at the back of her throat. Still, Rey tried.

Today, she ate lunch with the others.

Through a mouthful of food, she thought for a second that she could perceive the smell of leather and the taste of rainwater. Did she know the taste of rainwater? She sniffed, swallowed, then shook her head. She lifted her spork to her mouth, swallowing another bite of leftover vegetable stew. She rinsed it down with water, but the taste did not abate.

Then, a building pressure. Rey gagged over her tray as something pressed into the back of her tongue. It curled and her stomach lurched.

A single, wet finger.

Another emerged, a ring finger perhaps, skimming over the ridges of her right molars, invading the softness of the inside of her cheek.

There was a hand in her mouth.

Rey gasped and choked. She knocked her tray away, into Jessika, who did not react, her smiling face still trained on the mechanic across the table. More fingers, more leather. Rey heaved, trying to scream. Then their emergence, index to pinky, reaching from behind her lips, knocking the back of her front teeth. They curled tight around her lower jaw, covering her chin in black leather and spit. They _pulled_.

Rey gasped awake, sheets sweat-soaked and twisted around her limbs as she reached out desperately for something, anything. Her staff, maybe. But the comfort of its weight was gone among the other mundane losses, too numerous to recall how or where or when. There was nothing she could do but wait for the hammering of her heart to abate.

Slowly, her panic bled out into a diffuse feeling of aloneness. The base slept on without her, unperturbed by her terrors.

Drawing a shaky breath, Rey righted the sheets, turned back to face the wall, and drifted back into uneasy sleep.

That pulsing point in the distance understood how she felt, her dreams told her, as they bathed her in an embryonic red light. That space was quiet and close and frightening and comforting all at once, because it was so quiet, because it watched her so patiently, because it felt so good to sink into it.

\--

**\+ 64, 18:35.12 [ Outer Rim ]**

\--

The call had come at sun-up. An embedded agent on a First Order destroyer had reason to believe they had been compromised and requested immediate extraction. Leia hurried the hastily-gathered team through a series of objectives and equipment outfitting, promising that their pilot would brief them on the way. Soon Rey was being rushed through the hangar, dressed in First Order uniform, and shoving a stale quick-bread ration into her mouth, her jaw protesting with a dull ache.

A numb calm descended upon Rey as soon as the First Order destroyer came into the view of her transport’s windows. The anesthesia of the recently-woken, in part, but also a sense of familiarity. As one senses a memory carried on a familiar smell, Rey could sense an inborn knowledge of the ship that they approached.

Snap Wexley’s voice came through the transport comm. Less renowned than Poe perhaps, but his exceptional memory and tactical knowhow made him a solid point-pilot for a mission like this one.

“Alright, Grey Squadron” came his friendly-yet-authoritative hail, “as you can see, the _Limiter_ is practically up our noses and we’re out of hyperspace, so you can bet we’re about to land. And if you needed me to tell you that, you probably oughtta sit this one out. No hard feelings, Niyo.”

To Rey’s left, another operative laughed and clapped a hand on the shoulder of Tenree Niyo, the fighter at whom Snap’s joke was directed. The operative -- a few cycles older than Rey in actuality, but younger-looking around the eyes -- laughed along, too, running a deft, olive hand through their haphazardly cropped hair. Rey could feel their excitement shivering the Force around them. It was their first mission like this, the highest stakes they’d ever faced. Perhaps, Rey thought with a detachment that felt alien to her, the highest stakes they ever would.

Over the comm, Snap continued. “Like you were told in the briefing, we’re going to dock on an unused maintenance airlock that our good friend and the reason for our little visit, Agent Citadel, has left unlocked for us. Not only that, but they’ve jammed the surveillance in the area, so nobody ought to know anything until we’re already back on the way out.”

The transport lurched as they approached the airlock, manufactured gravity competing with the g-force of a turn. The other operatives shifted in preparation, some of them donning their white plasticine helmets, others adjusting their officer’s caps. Rey waited, watching them disappear beneath their disguises, becoming indistinguishable from ordinary stormtroopers and their ordinary leaders. She felt herself melt into character with them, straightening to better fill out her jodhpurs and the overcoat beneath which her saber was concealed.

The masking had a weight to it in the Force, and Rey couldn’t help but think of the weight that must hang over that helmet. Contempt radiated through her and she composed herself around it, tensing and releasing her muscles as Luke had shown her to do to keep steady.

“Grey Alpha,” Snap said, “you’ll be the spearhead, going directly to retrieve Citadel from the location they’ve sent us. I’m uploading it to your schematics now. Grey Beta, you’ll run interference, drawing attention away from Alpha for as long as possible, laying down cover fire if and only if we’ve exhausted all other options. Which brings me to Rey.” All eyes -- covered and uncovered -- swiveled to where she stood with an arm raised to the roll cage bar. “You’re our secret weapon. If Alpha squad is in danger of discovery, make some noise. If that asshole in the cape shows up -- that’s your job. Trying to keep our guys off the radar.”

Rey stiffened. There was a whoop, barely audible above the buzz of the comm and the ship, and a few fists raised in salute. Rey felt filled up by their confidence in her, then emptied out by a sudden sense that it was misplaced. Who was she to protect these people? Then a needling feeling, like a stinging wind on her cheek that filled the empty space with shame. When did it become her _job_ to protect these people?

She thought back to her excitement on Jakku, moments after meeting Finn. _I’ve never met a Resistance fighter before._ What the hell had she been thinking, then, that it brought such light to her eyes and such a smile to her face?

_Luke Skywalker… I thought he was a myth._

And he had been, hadn’t he? Worse, he was a failed myth - not even capable of dying a hero. They had asked her, who was she? Maybe she could be this, the shadow of a myth, in someone else’s clothes, but capable of killing her enemies. Yes, she could do that much.

The transport docked so gently Rey barely felt it, a testament to Snap’s skill and his qualification as their lead. And before any operative had a chance to convene a last huddle or give a last oorah, the mechanical buzz of the airlocks connecting -- and beginning to open -- plunged the vessel into silence and the lights went low.

\---

To the officers nearby, Kylo Ren, haggard from training and half-mad from sleeplessness, seemed to to have been suddenly been gripped by an invisible hand and twisted from his position in the center of the lower deck. He swung his head like a blind bantha towards the sound of its master’s whistle. His thoughts could not compose themselves past shreds these last few cycles, but for a moment he knew he had felt the ripple of her touching his ship. Her, tracing its edges as she used the Force like radar in the dark.

He felt a line connecting them like a cut, sharp as the edge of a shadow pressing against morning light, a white-chromatic intensity he hadn’t seen with bare eyes since--

He crushed the thought. So she was coming for him.

“We have guests,” he barked across the deck. “Find them.”

An officer met the blank stare of Ren’s visor with a look of hesitation, retracting his weak, aristocratic chin towards his neck before he spoke. “Commander, troops are scarce, it will take a moment to gather--”

“I didn’t ask about your troops, Lieutenant Commander Vizzen. That’s a blaster on your hip, is it not?”

“Yes, sir.” Fear flowed off the man as realization dawned. How proud Hux was of his finishing school cronies, all the reading and debating they’d done to earn their honored places licking his decorative, creature-leather boots. Kriffing useless.

Ren bellowed, overloading the mic on his vocoder, “Then FIND THEM!”

He drew a shaking breath, following as he did the seam of Force between himself and her -- Rey, the scavenger.

An unused docking station along the rear berth, near a set of holding cells. Nearly three miles of winding corridors separated them, but if he ran, if he could somehow pull her along, he might be able to-- to what? He did not know. But he let an electric sting carry him towards it nonetheless.

\---

As the creaking floor of the Resistance ship gave way to the thick and seamless bottom of the airlock, Rey’s ambivalence intensified, then snapped. So he was here after all, so near in her mind that she could smell the metallic blood-tang of him on the air.

The two teams froze, briefly, as Wexley sent them off. The hush was near-total and Wexley reported out quietly and efficiently, just above a whisper, diction crisp and precise so as not to need repeating.

“Alright, I’ve jammed the local comms to about two clicks out. That doesn’t cover the whole ship, but should confuse the hell out of the first teams that come across you and give you a head start once someone actually comes looking. No intelligence yet on Ren, but from what I can tell this tank is understaffed and they have no idea you’re here. You have a good shot. Godspeed Greys.”

The hairs rose on Rey’s neck as she sensed the nerves of her teammates and they mingled with the low pulse of threat. They -- the First Order -- knew they were here already, it was too late for that. But if they stayed they might still have a chance at recovering the agent, Citadel. And Rey knew, gut curling around itself, that if they left she could not kill Kylo Ren.

Niyo suddenly caught Rey’s shoulder, having stumbled already as they turned to go. She did not throw them off, but let them regain their footing and continue on. They followed the one that had sat next to them on the carrier, Crenn. She thought -- darkly, swiftly, like a scorpion in the sand -- that green, young Niyo was unlikely to survive this if they were already succumbing to nerves. She could not tell how much of the thought was her own and forgot to care that it might be.

The two teams began to disappear down the hall. First Alpha, all anonymous “troopers” strung out in pairs meant to move efficiently to the holding cell where they would override the lock and retrieve Citadel. Then Beta, manicured “officers” to follow them and catch any questions they may have raised, instructed to invoke the complex hierarchy of military rank to stall whenever the need arose.

The next went and the next until it was Rey alone, looking down the empty hall to her right at the stillness they left in their wake. Slowly, her hand came to her ear and switched off the comm, perfectly steady. She waited, feeling the tension of the Resistance agents drawing away pull against the deep red hum of Kylo Ren, as he wound his way through the ship towards her, then lower, further into its belly. She waited -- one breath, two -- and started on a silent footfall to her left. Away. Towards.

The redness pulsed, darker than she remembered it. The acrid edge of flame gone to ember and oxblood. Infection given way to wound. Rey thought about debts, about sucking that wound dry. Had her pace been audible, it would have sounded down the tunnels like a rising heartbeat. Such a sound rose in her anyways.

As she descended, the light around her morphed, each level dimming the further she strayed from where officers and prisoners were usually kept. The sharp angles of the ceilings and alcoves smoothed themselves utilitarian and the lights took on a yellow cast rather than the harsh white of upper decks. The driving hum of the ship’s nuclear core expanded to fill the empty space.

By the time she reached the entrance to the core, the air around Rey was crackling with her proximity to Kylo Ren. Her heart beat so loudly in her ears and across her body that she could not hear the hiss of the port opening. Rey clawed at the fastenings of her jacket, letting it open to reveal her undershirt and saber. She lunged across the span of the walk, thirty feet or more, felt like she flew it. Perhaps she did.

Their sabers met in a mirror of the last time, harsh, cracking heat-light meeting between their bared faces. This time, though, they were evenly matched. Rey screamed as she pushed against Kylo Ren, no need to seek the Force out this time -- now it _lived_ in her, as wide and shiftless as the sea, obliterating and remaking her strength with each breath.

But he met her strike for strike and they fought like animals.

She threw elbows and knees hard enough to break bone, their lethality only tempered by the Force Ren drew around him like armor. Blows landed, sounding sharp as blaster fire and his shouts of pain exploded from him just as loud. And though he cut down with the unstoppable precision of a cannon laser, Rey’s body shimmered and wavered away, equally precise and unstoppable.

The shrieking of their sabers grew with their frenzy, blotting out even the sound of the nuclear reactor below them.

Rey capitalized on an opening in Ren’s haphazard defense, bringing the butt of her saber down on his trapezius with the Force behind it, and he crumpled to his back. But as he fell, Ren shot a leg out and jolted Rey’s left kneecap, bringing her, flailing, down with him. She swung as she came down, blue saber juddering down red until it caught on the quillons. Then again, drawing back and bearing down. And again. And again, shouting herself up to a sustained, hoarse scream. Kylo Ren bore the strikes with gritted teeth, until the last when Rey’s saber caught his own at a strange angle and bounced up, against her expectations.

Ren rolled his body, throwing his weight forward through the thighs, and dislodged Rey from where she had knelt over him. She screamed again, louder even, as she fell. The sound of it pierced the air and echoed in Ren’s mind, harsh and familiar -- Darksided.

Time slowed as Rey fought the ship’s local gravity and tried to climb back onto her feet. She felt filled with light and fire, burning out of her skin and eyes and mouth. Something inside of her went wild with rage and screamed at her, **_STRIKE._** He rolled and began to move towards her, almost in a crawl, not willing to waste the time to stand. Each microsecond brought him closer to her, centimeters at a-- Then a call that blinded her with its intensity, the Force itself, voiceless and languageless, yet clear: **_HE CANNOT TOUCH YOU._**

Kylo Ren’s arm ached as he raised it, but he made to come back down upon her anyway. He gathered his breath to shout something at her -- an offer? An apology? -- but it was stolen as she lifted a hand into a claw before her chest.

He froze.

She held him there.

He struggled against her. She held him anyways.

Her breath slowed and calmed, as if it took no effort at all, her face smoothing the longer she had him trapped. Her eyes closed.

\---

Rey fell upon Kylo in a flurry of blows, fists like water smashing rock, each one eroding him further than the last. Her knee connected with his jaw and he tasted blood, felt flecks of tooth and tongue emerge from the wholeness of his mouth. She struck him on the crown with her saber’s hilt and though he wished he could pass out from the pain, he did not, the spot throbbing fire down his entire body and bringing him to his hands and knees. He could not stand up from this, he realized. If no one came to save him, he would die here, at her hands. For her pleasure.

There was another sharp crack as Rey’s knee connected with Kylo Ren’s spine and he fell further, unable to scream, reduced to moaning out his pain as though already dying. She crushed her boot into the back of his head. His nose broke on the floor, more blood rushing out from him. She ignited her saber and -- swiftly, deeply -- cut up his back from thigh to shoulder, payback. Kylo Ren sobbed into the floor with what would surely be his dying breaths. Rey smiled.

She left his mind like a knife left a wound, gaping and empty, and the blood rushed back in.

Kylo Ren found himself on his knees again, not whole but mostly unharmed. Rey was standing before him, claw-hand outstretched, the gesture signalling how her power had no need of subtlety or precision. She had killed him inside his own mind and he was utterly cowed before her.

Breathing into his body, Ren realized she was no longer holding him immobile, but he made no move to meet her. He waited. He begged her silently to come closer, to finish the job in the flesh or something else. Her presence rolled like thunder across him and he could not help it. He thought of the storm, the rain, his vision of clean hands, and his throat tightened beyond anything his master would have allowed.

So this was how: With stillness.

Maybe she would kill him, after all. Maybe that would be okay.

\---

“Will you do it?” He asked her, voice still smooth and arresting as it had been before. He sounded too young, too much like he had spent his life silent, those muscles underused.

She stared back, thinking of the other voice that had commanded her not to let him touch her. The same one that now whispered behind her ear that, while he could not touch her, she _could_ touch him.

“Answer me!”

Rey scowled and lit her saber, goading him to fight. But Kylo Ren did not rise. She took a stride towards him and still he remained on his knees. She stepped again and held her saber high, preparing for a killing blow or a hard parry. His eyes followed the blue of the saber, but Kylo Ren did not even flinch.

He was asking if she would kill him. He was allowing it.

And in the same moment she realized that, she realized she could not. Not out of a feeling of righteousness or bitterness, but because of how he was before her, knee-high and pleading. She could practically see his face at six, the same as it was now, asking his mother if she was afraid of him. She could see the deep red of his presence in the Force shimmer to purple, glow shards of blue in the shadows.

Rey clicked off her saber and fled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And thus the First Completion comes to a close...
> 
> Thank you guys so much for sticking with us! This is our last update before the release of TLJ and a short hiatus over the winter holidays. We're hard at work on the Second Completion for you already, and hopefully it'll be good to go shortly after the new year. 
> 
> Your comments and kudos give us life!! Thank you so much to our regular readers, we absolutely love you. 
> 
> (Additionally, Kelly is currently on social media blackout, but she does check her notifs, so if you send her a message she will definitely get back to you.)


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